A welcome home reception for astronaut Sam Durrance and
scientists on the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope team will be held
3 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesday, April 25,in Schafler Auditorium at
the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy, on the Johns
Hopkins Homewood campus.

The event is open to media coverage and open to the public.

Dr. Durrance, a Johns Hopkins astrophysicist, was on the space
shuttle Endeavour during the historic 16 and a half day Astro-2
mission. As a payload specialist, he operated Astro-2's three
ultraviolet telescopes, one of which was HUT, designed and built
by scientists at Hopkins and the Applied Physics Laboratory.

He will talk about the space observatory and present slides and a
video taken during the mission.

Astrophysicist Arthur Davidsen, a professor in the Department of
Physics and Astronomy, also will discuss the mission. Dr.
Davidsen headed the HUT project and conceived of the idea in the
late 1970s.

Endeavour returned to Earth on March 18. Scientists are now
analyzing the large amount of data they collected with HUT and
will publish their findings in the years to come. A special
session for Astro-2 research has been scheduled for a meeting of
the American Astronomical Society in June.

By studying ultraviolet light, which is filtered out by the
Earth's atmosphere, astronomers can learn many details, such as
composition, temperature and velocity of objects in space. The
telescope collected about 30 compact disc's worth of information
-- a massive amount of data considering that an encyclopedia can
fit on one CD.

If you need additional information feel free to call me at
(410)516-7906.

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